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Follower Recs

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Long-time follower here, but first time submitting a rec. It’s a completed work I read recently that has Wangxian, toddler A-Yuan, bunnies (one of them patchwork), Yanli, Zixuan, Jin Ling, one former traveling house and another still-traveling house. Had to rec for the Wangxian meet cute, the worldbuilding, and there be odds and ends critters with all sorts of creatures great and small dropping by. There’s even a qilin! @zuvi

Wei Wuxian’s Home for Lost Creatures

by Stratisphyre

G, 22k, Wangxian

Summary: Wei Wuxian’s house came to town and settled by the sea.

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(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for this hard-working author if you like – or think others might like – this story.)

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One trope that always tickles my brain in just the right places is a setting where the Horrors have been around for so long that society has shifted to account for them, and not in a bloodborne "we shaped our entire society around the worship of the blood of a dead god" way, I mean society goes on as usual and has so thoroughly planned around these things that the average person has passing knowledge of how to deal with them and they're treated more like bears: dangerous but ultimately mundane

You open a children's French textbook and see a chapter on how to speak basic French wards against francophone spectres

The local worker owned coffee coop made a land dedication to the ancient sleepers whose strontium bones were buried under the space they rent before the sky had a name

Checking for slumbering Old Ones is standard procedure when doing land and ocean surveys

Australia is exactly the same

There are archeologists who specialise in handling cursed artifacts and neutralising corpses that aren't as dead as they should be

There's an XKCD comic mapping shipping lanes over maps of known Deep One colonies which then concludes that boats, not the people manning them, the actual boats themselves, are naturally scared of sunken cities

The Vatican has the largest known population of bound demons on earth, which are mainly used in the training of exorcists

Scientific American is publishing papers on the buildup of plastic waste in the Backrooms

The price of selling your soul is considered taxable income, has a sales tax, and is subject to inflation

Overly Sarcastic Productions has a Classics Summarised video on the Hanged King's Tragedy

The city council mapped out the exact dimensions of a local ghost's haunting ground and that space is now the unused sub-basement of a shiny new Walmart

Zombie outbreaks are treated as a rare and usually seasonal occurance that is quickly dealt with by the WHO

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Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence. It marks the first systematic assessment of whether an association exists between a ban on corporal punishment and the frequency in which adolescents get into fights. 

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And they were roommates...

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I made Hungarian mushroom soup and it's a little too delicious to be real

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fatphobia and ableism is so insidious. You can look up like, food, and it'll say "eating a lot of food causes diabetes" and you're like oh dang what? I thought we didn't know the cause of diabetes. So you look up what causes diabetes and it says "we still don't know what causes diabetes" bruh they're just making shit up to give people eating disorders

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People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once

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If you’re european and can vote please sign!

In any case, share as much as you can

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and they were mad scientist buddies who saved each other’s little brothers through ethically dubious means <3

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There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

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Calvin and Hobbes was magic--and sometimes a little creepy--when it embraced surrealism. And this was in the funny papers alongside goofiness like Garfield and The Family Circus.

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nobody is allowed to call themselves a Batfam fan unless they know about Harold, the genius hunchback who lived in the Batcave for ten real-life years building Bruce's bat-tech

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“Call Me Maybe” with every other beat removed

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Thank you for the note on that post about activism. I’ve never seen a protest actually work and I’m 24 years old. I know It’s important to keep trying but, you hit the nail on the head for why young people are so disillusioned, nothing we do seems to help. Do you have any information about some that did, and maybe what the difference was?

Hi anon,

Yes, I have one very current example of an ongoing protest that is working:

People have been protesting outside of Tesla dealerships all around the country every Saturday for months now, and these small, localized protests (as well as online activism and generalized social pressure) absolutely have been helping to tank Tesla's stock price, which is one way of weakening Elon Musk's power. These protests have made it unpleasant for people to get their cars serviced, way less likely to go to a dealership to buy, and much more uncomfortable about driving their cars around town because of the stigma associated with Tesla. Have they stopped Musk from running roughshod with DOGE? No. But they have made people look elsewhere for electric cars, and they've clearly sent Musk into a tailspin. They're more effective than meeting once en masse at fewer places, because the consistency helps remind people this is a live issue, and if you're driving down a big arterial road in your random town and see a bunch of people posted up with signs at the Tesla dealership rather than seeing them in NYC on TV that says to you "people in my town, in my area, care about this. It's not just the most annoying people in the major metro areas that I resent calling for this stuff. People like me, living in my circumstances, also care."

I will also say that protest and public outcry is constantly making changes at the local level. Here's a negative example: If you're wondering why you're struggling so much with the cost of housing, it's probably in large part because NIMBY activists - people who don't want any new housing built, especially the kind of dense housing that's good for a city's financial solvency and for lower income people and for the environment – are consistently showing up to city/town council meetings and loudly protesting any new development. These tend to be people who don't want housing stock to increase because it will make housing cheaper (and thus their single-family properties less valuable for resale or remortgage) and also people who are just allergic to change. You know who's not showing up to these meetings? Young people who need housing. Part of that is structural (people who are struggling to find housing are more likely to be economically stressed and not have time to show up regularly to council meetings) but it's also that a lot of young people are unwilling to spend their free time doing something "boring" like advocating for themselves and their communities at a meeting where you have to wait around and maybe have a speech or a letter prepared, or do some research beforehand. And maybe if more people showed up to oppose NIMBYs at boring meetings, more housing would get built. In my area the NIMBY harassment of pro-housing city council members has been so bad that some have resigned out of fear for their families' safety. If these people had had more support, maybe they'd still be doing the work.

Protest isn't always an organized mass on a public street; it's also citizens making some organized attempt to oppose a policy or project, or citizens calling loudly for the need for a project.

I tend to think mass protests with vague goals are ineffective at achieving their vague goals for obvious reasons, but that they do have some utility; they bring people together and help them make connections with other people who are motivated to make change. But if you want to see change that's less abstract or incidental, that's really directly a reflection of your actions, then focus on local activism, and have clear policy goals in mind. If you want more housing, for instance, you have to start caring about zoning, about how development works, about how local property tax laws affect the issue, or you have to start listening to people who DO care about that stuff.

The biggest mistake I see young people making is basing your politics entirely on the vibe. The people who are effective at making change figure out how things actually work. They don't have to be the people who have the best or purest motives and cleanest, most virtuous personal politics. Often they're not.

That sometimes means learning stuff you would once have found boring, and deciding it's interesting because it's materially useful to your cause. I also means building coalitions with people who disagree with you on some things in order to achieve a goal you DO agree upon.

The Tesla protests are trying to create a physical and social impediment to people who would otherwise by Teslas, and by focusing on the places where a lot of those sales would actually happen (and where all the vehicle servicing has to happen, because Tesla sucks) they have actively made it annoying and unpleasant to buy a Tesla. Protesters introduce real friction into a process that Tesla wants and needs to be easy. Similarly, NIMBYs introduce friction into the process of housing development, so even if a developer has already bought a lot and is planning to build a bunch of new units that could house a lot of people (has designed the development, put in the proposal, has the permits, is all ready to go), the developer might end up deciding it's not worth it because the delays caused by change-averse retires at city council meetings are costing them too much. So you have less housing in your city over-all, rents and property values remain prohibitively high, density remains low (which means the city's tax base is smaller and you have less money to go to projects that benefit everyone, like schools and libraries and social programs and even basic infrastructure like sewage systems and roads). If you show up to that city council meeting and are a counter to the voices trying to make friction - if you help easy the way instead - maybe the housing does get built. Maybe increases in supply mean the rents can come down a bit, because people have more options. The city gets a little bit denser, there's a little more money to hire another librarian, or fix the potholes on your street, or make safe bike lanes, or hire more school counselors. You've not only achieved your goal of making it a little easier to find a place to live; you've made your town a better town in other ways, too.

There are a lot of ways that you can make a difference. If you don't think showing up to a reactionary mass protest every so often is the way for you (though I'd argue doing that is still helpful) that doesn't mean that activism isn't for you, or that you can't make major change. Pick something specific, and make that your thing.

It's also worth noticing that gun-control activists in Florida actually did get some stuff done; unfortunately a lot of the progress they made was rolled back, and that's a good lesson in realizing that the arc of the moral universe doesn't automatically bend toward justice. You have to consistently, actively make it bend, and if you don't – if you give up – things get worse.